he was not in the ecstatic state; his contemplative mind was unable to grasp the importance of independent thought, a fact amply proved by his inglorious quarrel with Abelard, the greatest thinker of his time.  This quarrel was a typical illustration of the difference between the believer and the thinker.  Bernard forgot all about love, and did not hesitate to stir up unpleasantness whenever he could do so.  So he wrote to Pope Innocent II.:  “Peter Abelard is striving to destroy the Christian faith, and imagines that his human intellect can penetrate the depths of the divine mind....  Nothing is hidden from him, neither in the earth below, nor in the heavens above; his intellectual pride exceeds all limits; he attacks the doctrines of faith, and ponders problems far above his intellectual capacity; he is an inventor of heresies ...,” etc.  Thanks to his machinations, Abelard was compelled to recant at the Council of Sens, and was condemned by the Pope to eternal silence.  Berengar of Poitier took Abelard’s part, and in a satirical treatise ventured to criticise St. Bernard’s conduct:  “Thus philosophise the old women at the looms.  Of course, when Bernard tells us that we must love God, he speaks a true and venerable word; but he need not have opened his lips to do so, for it is a self-evident truth.”  As a matter of fact, these words branded and contradicted the merely subjective emotional mysticism; to the emotional mystic salvation lies in the “absorption in God,” in shapeless, thoughtless contemplation.  Richard of St. Victor, founding his theories on St. Bernard, established six stages of meditation.  The Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, the famous author of the Biblia Pauperum, added a seventh, a complete rest in God—­“like the Sabbath after the six days of labour.”  To Bonaventura, as later on to Dante, the world was a ladder leading up to God.

If we turn from these thinkers of the Neo-Latin race, who in spite of their undeniable mysticism were completely under the dominion of the Church—­to German mysticism, we find above and beyond mysticism, we find above and beyond love, a new principle:  The soul of man is the starting-point of religious consciousness and the content of the religious consciousness is the soul’s road to God.  The nativity of Christ ceased to be regarded as a historical event, and became the birth of the divine principle in the soul of man.  In passing I will mention a German nun, Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1277), who anticipated some of the great thoughts of Eckhart, although she was incapable of grasping their mutual connection.  “The Holy Trinity and everything in heaven and earth must be subject to me” (the soul), were words in the true spirit of Eckhart, leaving St. Bernard far behind.  Mechthild found metaphors of true poetical grandeur when she spoke of the union of the soul with God.  “The dominion of the fire has yet to come.  That is Jesus Christ in Whose hands the Heavenly Father has laid the salvation of the world and the Last Judgment.  On the Day of Judgment He shall fashion cups of wondrous beauty out of the crackling sparks; therein the Father will drink on His festival all the holiness which through His dear Son He has poured into human souls.”